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The National Advisory Centre on Careers for Women (1933-1995) was founded in 1933. During the First World War, the London National Society for Women's Suffrage opened a Women's Service Department to find openings for volunteer workers as well as taking the lead in training women for war work. At the end of the war the parent organisation became the London National Society for Women's Service (LNSWS), and the section became the Women's Employment Department, continuing its work until 1922. It concentrated on the problems of women left unemployed by the returning male workers. The Carnegie Trust, which funded its activities for a time, made attempts to integrate it with the Central Bureau for the Employment of Women, but this failed and the department closed due to financial problems. In 1933, this function was largely taken over by a new group called, initially the National Federation of Organisations Concerned with the Employment and Training of Women, soon renamed the Women's Employment Federation. It maintained close connections with the LNSWS, and shared premises with them until 1939 with the LNSWS president Ray Strachey as its first organising secretary. It too was funded by the Carnegie Trust but this time its object was to co-ordinate the work of organisations dealing with women's employment, to prevent overlapping and to assist each in its individual work by offering opportunities for consultation and co-operation between them. The constituent organisations were all concerned with the employment and training of women, such as: the Association of Assistant Mistresses, the Association of Head Mistresses, the Midwives Institute, the National Association of Women Pharmacists, the Council of Women Civil Servants, as well as women's schools and universities. Between them they decided on the election of the executive committee and the policies of the group. The group contained an Advisory Department that collected information on careers and openings that were then available to members and the public, as well as organising advice, publications and speakers. Between 1935 and 1940 it received an average of 3816 enquiries annually and in 1939 was asked to compile a national register of women workers. At the outbreak of the Second World War, the group moved to Bedford College. When its main organiser, Ray Strachey, died in 1940, others took over the work and it was her friend, Irene Hilton, that remained the Federation's organisation secretary from 1948 until 1971, when it became the National Advisory Centre on Careers for Women. This remained its name until 1991 when it became Careers for Women. It ceased operating in 1995.

Alice Anne Burbury ([1844-1911]) was born in Yorkshire, the eldest daughter of Thomas Edward Taylor, and became the wife of Samuel Hawksley Burbury, the mathematician and lawyer, on 12 Apr 1860. The couple had four sons and two daughters before Alice Anne Burbury seems to have become interested in women's suffrage. Her name first appears on the annual subscription lists of the Central Committee of the National Society for Women's Suffrage in 1898, where it remained until 1902. However, her interest in the issue predated this membership as this series of letters was written by her to leaders of the movements for women's education and women's enfranchisement between 1872 and c.1893. At some point in her career, she evidently stood for election to a School Board and a committee was formed to support her, but she appears not to have succeeded in her efforts on this occasion. She survived her husband who died in Aug 1911.

Anna Davin (b 1940), daughter of Winnie and Dan Davin, grew up in Oxford, where her parents worked for the Oxford University Press. She married Luke Hodgkin in 1958 and had three children. From 1966 to 1969 she was a History student at Warwick University. In 1968 she and other women members of the Socialist Society at Warwick, including American exchange students, started a Women's Liberation Group. Along with non-student members from nearby Coventry the group campaigned on general issues such as equal pay, reproductive rights and better access to university education, and called for a crèche to be established for women working and studying at the university. Anna was closely involved in the History Workshop movement during the 1970s. She was a founding member of the editorial collective of History Workshop Journal, in 1976, and was to continue as an active editor for over thirty years. In 1970 she moved to London and started a History PhD at Birkbeck College. This was initially about the lives of late 19th century working-class women in London, from childhood to old age, but when eventually submitted, in 1992, its focus was on children; the book Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London 1870-1914 followed in 1996. In London she joined the Stratford Women's Liberation Group (and helped produce their issue of Shrew), and also a feminist study group in Pimlico (the 'History Group'), and for a time helped in the Women's Liberation office. She was active in a pioneering community history group ('People's Autobiography of Hackney'); in the Feminist History Group; and also in 'The Public Library', a short-lived attempt to establish a library of political ephemera. Her best-known publication is an article called 'Imperialism and Motherhood', (History Workshop Journal, no 5, 1976). Anna taught women's history for many years: London evening classes in the 1980s; as a visiting lecturer at Binghamton University, New York for six weeks a year between 1979 and 2002; at Middlesex University as a part-timer and research fellow in the 1990s; and twice as maternity cover on the Women's History MA at Royal Holloway, University of London. She subsequently taught summer school students from the University of Michigan and an annual Oral History course at the Institute of Historical Research; and returned to adult education, teaching London history for the Continuing Education department at Birkbeck College.

Agnes Maude Royden (1876-1956) was born on 23 Nov 1876, the youngest daughter of the ship-owning Conservative MP from Liverpool, Sir Thomas Bland Royden (later first baronet of Frankby Hall, Cheshire). She was educated first at Cheltenham Ladies College, then at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford from 1896-1899, where she met Kathleen Courtney and Ida O'Malley. She obtained a second-class degree in modern history.

After graduating she spent three years working with the Victoria Women's Settlement in Liverpool. In these years around 1900 Royden's political views moved away from her family's Conservatism until she joined the Labour Party after the First World War. In 1905 Royden undertook parish work in South Luffenham for the Reverend William Hudson Shaw, whom she had met at Oxford. She became friends with him and his second wife Effie. They remained close friends, Royden marrying Shaw after Effie's death. The marriage took place just two months before Shaw's death in 1944. Shaw enabled Royden to lecture in the Oxford University Extension Delegacy Scheme, for which he also lectured. Royden was one of the first female lecturers for the Scheme. In 1908 Royden became a regular speaker for the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). She was appointed to its executive committee in 1911, edited its newspaper 'The Common Cause' between 1913-1914 and wrote 5 pamphlets for them. From 1910, she supported the Tax Resistance League and was the first Chair of the Church League for Women's Suffrage. From 1911 was a member of the executive committee of the London Society for Women's Suffrage (LSWS). By 1912 she was giving well over 250 speeches a year and ran 'Speakers classes' for NUWSS and LSWS. In 1913 she was also appointed president of the Chester Women's Suffrage Society, vice president of the Oxford Women Students' Suffrage Society. 1912 was an important year for the future of the women's movement. It was in this year that the Labour Party made support for female suffrage part of its policy for the first time. When, that same year, the NUWSS launched the Election Fighting Fund policy, which promised support to any party officially supporting suffrage in an election where the candidate was challenging an anti-suffrage Liberal, the effect was to effectively support the Labour Party. The women's suffrage campaign had long been associated with the Liberal Party and had always been non-party, welcoming the left and right wing into its numbers. After this step, however, some members, such as Eleanor Rathbone, left the organisation in opposition to this step. Royden, however, supported the move and was one of the speakers at the joint meeting of the NUWSS and the Labour Party held in the Albert Hall in Feb 1914. Later in 1914 at the outbreak of the First World War, Royden found herself in conflict with many in the NUWSS, which under the leadership of Millicent Fawcett, had thrown itself enthusiastically into support for work to support the war effort. At the end of 1914 she became the secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation with other Christian Pacifists. In Feb 1915 she resigned as editor of 'Common Cause' and gave up her place on the executive council. She had intended to attend the women's peace congress in the Hague in 1915 that year but was unable to do so when travel via the North Sea was forbidden. None the less, when the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom was established there, she became the vice-president. Despite this, even outside of the NUWSS, she campaigned for the vote for women through the National Council for Adult Suffrage and when a limited franchise was granted in 1918, she was asked to address the celebratory meeting organised by the older group at the Queen's Hall. In the post-war period, her main interests were concerned with the role of women in the Church. Between 1917-1920 Royden became an assistant preacher to Dr Fort Newton at the City Temple. Though a committed Anglican, as a woman she was not normally permitted to preach in the Church of England. In 1920 she was granted an interdenominational pulpit at the Kensington Town Hall through the Fellowship Services. This position was soon transferred to the Guildhouse in Eccleston Square and she continued to preach socially radical sermons from there for some years, on issues such as unemployment, peace and marriage. Percy Dearmer and Martin Shaw assisted her. In turn Royden continued to assist Hudson Shaw in his parish St Botolph's Bishopsgate in the City of London, including a controversial appearance to preach in a service on Good Friday 30 Mar 1923.

In 1922 Royden was invited to stand as a Labour candidate for the Wirral constituency but declined for the sake of her work in the church. Royden made several preaching tours across the world from the 1920s to the 1940s and undertook large-scale article writing: She visited America in 1911, 1923, 1928, and 1941-1942. The 1928 visit was part of a world tour that included Australia, New Zealand and China. Whilst in 1928 and 1934-1935 she visited India with Dame Margery Corbett Ashby and met Ghandi. Royden continued her work for peace, through her 'Peace Army' proposals of 1923 and her support of the League of Nations. People such as Rev 'Dick' Shepherd and Herbert Gray in turn supported Royden. Royden resigned from the Guildhall post in 1936 to concentrate her efforts in this area until 1939. In 1939, however, Royden renounced pacifism believing Nazism to be a greater evil than war. In 1944 she married Hudson Shaw. After 1945, she was mainly occupied by writing and radio broadcasts on religion. Her last book was A Threefold Cord 1947 an autobiographical work. Royden died at her home in London on the 30 Jul 1956.

Dorothy Hill (1909-1999), otherwise known as Chili Bouchier, actress, was born in Fulham 12 Sep 1909. Her parents were Alice and Frank Boucher and Chili was one of four children, her siblings being Jack, Hilda and Irene. Chili's first public appearances were performing in shows put on by Madam Cleaver Lee's School of Ballet (1920-1922). Her first position was working at Harrods Department store where she was paid fifteen shillings a week to model clothes from the Ladies Wear Collections. It was whilst working at Harrods that she acquired the nickname of Chili as one colleague thought she resembled a singer who sang a popular song - My Chili, Chili, Bom Bom. When Chili was dismissed from Harrods for a minor indiscretion, she started a course to learn how to become a film star. Chili was soon selected to appear in a series of short sound pictures made by Phonofilms at Clapham studios, London in 1927. Her career was established when she appeared as a bathing beauty in 'Shooting Stars' in 1927. In Sep 1929 she married fellow actor Harry Milton (1900-1965), whom she had met on set whilst filming 'Chick', they eventually divorced in 1937. Her first 'talkie' was 'The Call of the Sea', shown in 1930. In 1931 Chili Bouchier was involved in the remake of 'Carnival', a film which had been instrumental in encouraging her to enter the film industry. Whilst under contract to British and Dominions Studios, Chili Bouchier was loaned to Paramount based at Elstree Studios. During 1934 Chili reverted to using her original name Dorothy but changed back to using Chili due to demand from her fans in 1935. In 1935, Chili Bouchier signed to Warner Brothers at Teddington Studios. The success of the Warner Brothers film 'Gypsy' culminated in Chili receiving a personal visit from Jack and Harry Warner who invited her to Hollywood to make some films there. Unfortunately, Chili Bouchier did not settle and returned to England in 1938 while still under contract to Warner Brothers. They did not renew her contract six months later. Having received no offer of any other film contract, Chili Bouchier turned her attention to the theatre and formed her own repertory company, The Chili Bouchier Players, in 1939. Edmund John Cuthbertson, otherwise known as Teddy Joyce, was Chili's next love and fiancé. The Canadian born bandleader, whom she had first met in 1935, died suddenly in 1941, after suffering from cerebro-spinal fever. During the Second World War, Chili went to Alexandria and Cairo where she performed in various plays staged by the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA). In 1946 Chili Bouchier married Peter de Greef, a fellow actor she had met a few years previously. They separated a few months later, divorcing in 1955. Chili Bouchier spent most of her career during this time in the theatre. After her separation from Peter de Greef, Chili Bouchier moved into a flat in Dolphin Square, (Pimlico, London) where she met an old friend again, Bluey Hill, who also lived at Dolphin Square. Bluey Hill was an Australian film director, with whom she lived for twenty-three years. They eventually married on 1 Apr 1977. Chili Bouchier continued working during the sixties and seventies, appearing in 'The Mousetrap' in 1971 and 1974 and in 'Harvey' with James Stewart in 1975. Incidentally, James Stewart appeared in one of Chili's all time favourite films, the Glen Miller Story. The other two favourites being Sunset Boulevard and Gone with the Wind (Copies of these films were owned by Chili and were regularly viewed). In 1995 Chili Bouchier appeared on television and radio as part of the celebrations for the 'Centenary of Cinema'. She also appeared on 'Barrymore'. Chili died three days before her ninetieth birthday on 9 Sep 1999.

Catherine Thackray was born in May 1922, the daughter of Margery Sharp and one of eight children. The family moved to France before returning to Cambridge where Catherine attended the Perse School. As the Second World War broke out, she began work at the Fulham Day Nursery where she worked or a short time until she moved to working at Barclays' Bank and then on to Southwark Day Nursery. However, she went on to enlist in the ATS as a Specialist Wireless Operator and was posted to Harrogate, Shenly, Lancashire, Derby and then Aldermaston. She left the service in 1943 and then went on to study at the London University Collage, obtaining a diploma in Social Sciences. In 1944 she joined the Battersea Labour party, going on to join the Central London branch of the Fabian Society three years later. In 1949 she married Lawrence Thackery and completed her training as a psychiatric social worker at the Tavistock Clinic. In 1949 the couple moved to Surrey. Catherine Thackery began work at the Woking Child Guidance Clinic the next year before they moved once again, this time to Huddersfield in 1951. There she became a volunteer at the local Citizens' Advice Bureau and the local secretary of CND. In 1953 she was elected the councillor for the Milnsbridge ward. When her first child was born in 1956 she continued her work for another fourteen months before resigning her position. After this she was a house worker for 12 years before returning to teaching when the youngest of her children went to school. She taught at the local technical college before working at the new secondary modern. Her research into the lives of seventy married women was published in 'Education' in 1968. She remained active in the anti-nuclear movement until the end of her life and in 1984 she was arrested during a protest outside of Greenham Common. She died in 1997.

Dorothy Shelagh Brown (fl. 1942-1945) was held as a prisoner of war in a Japanese camp in the Far East during World War Two, 1942-1945. During this time, she wrote a diary of her daily experiences in this environment.

Elsa Fraenkel (1892-1975) was a sculptor and artist who became friends with Sylvia Pankhurst during the post-war period. They met for the first time in 1950 Fraenkel herself became interested in Ethiopia, the country with which Pankhurst was involved at the time. By 1950 the former was helping to organise cultural events featuring the African nation in London and contributed some of her own work to the celebration that was held in London when the Princess Tsahay Hospital was dedicated. Before Sylvia Pankhurst went to live in Ethiopia in 1956, she left her paintings and sketches with Mrs Elsa Fraenkel, herself a sculptor. When Pankhurst had moved to Ethiopia, Fraenkel contacted her with the aim of creating an exhibition of her work during her time with the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). Pankhurst was unable to help her having left behind much of the work she had created at the turn of the century, but was able to give her information on the time and send her photographs of a WSPU fete in the Princes Skating Rink. The eventual exhibition of work which was eventually arranged by Fraenkel and Lady Winstedt took place at the French Institute on 5 Dec 1959, sponsored by the Suffragette Fellowship, the Women's Freedom league and the Royal India, Pakistan and Ceylon Society. Fraenkel also wrote an (undated) article on 'Sylvia Pankhurst : student days' which was based on notes supplied by Sylvia. After Pankhurst's death in 1960, Elsa offered a portrait of her to the National Portrait Gallery.

Edith How Martyn (1875-1954) was born in London in 1875, sister of Florence Earengey. She attended the North London Collegiate School and then University College, Aberystwyth where she took the associateship in Physics and Mathematics. She married Herbet Martyn in 1899, completing her BSc the following year. From youth, she had radical political opinions and was a member of the Independent Labour Party before becoming an early member of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1905. The following year she was appointed joint secretary of the WSPU with Charlotte Despard and it was in Oct 1906 that she was arrested in the lobby of the House of Commons and given a two-month sentence. However, the future direction of the WSPU under the Pankhursts was a matter of some concern to her as it was to other members at this time and in 1907 she left the group along with Charlotte Despard to form the Women's Freedom League (WFL). This abandoned the violent tactics of the older group in favour of non-violent illegal acts to convey their message. She was honorary secretary of the new group from 1907 to 1911, when she became head of the Political and Militant section. However, she resigned in Apr 1912, disappointed with the WFL's progress after the defeat of the Conciliation Bill. How-Martyn's next political act was to stand as an independent candidate in Hendon in the 1918 general election, an attempt she was not successful in. How Martyn held public office for the first time In 1919, when she became a member of the Middlesex County Council, a post she held until 1922. From now on, her interests would be mainly directed to the issue of birth control. She met the American family planning leader Margaret Sanger in 1915 and had been impressed by her ideas, subsequently organising the 1927 World Population Conference in Geneva with the New Yorker and becoming honorary director of the Birth Control International Information Centre in London in 1930. Between Nov 1934 and Mar 1935 the Englishwoman would travel through India campaigning for birth control, then went with Sanger on her trip to Asia the following year. How-Martyn returned the sub-continent several times in the following years to continue the work started there at this point. However, her past campaigning for women's suffrage was not forgotten: in 1926 she also established the Suffragette Fellowship that would begin the process of documenting the movement. She would continue this work in the following decades through a local branch in Australia which she established after she moved there at the outbreak of the Second World. Due to ill health, she remained in that country until she died in 1954.

Elsie Edith Bowerman (1889-1973) was born in Tunbridge Wells on 18 Dec 1889. She was the daughter of William Bowerman and his wife Edith Martha Barber. Her father died soon afterwards and her mother subsequently remarried a Mr Chibnall. Bowerman was sent to be educated at Wycombe Abbey Church of England girls' boarding school in Buckinghamshire and left there in 1907 for a period in Paris before going to Cambridge a year later to read Mediaeval and Modern Languages at Girton College. It was during her time there that she followed her mother into the women's suffrage movement. Both were active members of the militant Women's Social and Political Union. Bowerman passed her Tripos in 1911 and the following year, on 10 Apr 1912, she and her mother took a trip to the United States on the Titanic. Both survived and continued with their journey to British Columbia, the Klondyke and Alaska. In Jul 1916 Bowerman was invited by a colleague from the suffrage movement to go to Serbia as a driver for a Scottish women's hospital unit serving Serbian and Russian armies in Rumania. In Nov 1916 her unit set up a hospital near the Danube before having to swiftly dismantle it as the allies were swept into a retreat to the Russian frontier. She was in St Petersburg in Mar 1917 where she recorded the events she witnessed in the midst of the Russian Revolution. She returned to England in 1917 and immediately undertook speaking tours for the Scottish Women's Hospitals, raising awareness of their work and collecting funds. At the same time she worked for Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst during their campaign for 'industrial peace' in support of the war effort. In 1924 or 1925 she went on to set up the Women's Guild of Empire with Flora Drummond, with the continued aim of promoting co-operation between employers and workers and attacking communism. However, her principal interest was now the law, in which she gained an MA. She was admitted to the Bar in the early twenties and practised until 1938 on the South Eastern Circuit. As the Second World War approached, Bowerman gave up her legal practice to join the Women's Voluntary Services and worked with its founder Lady Reading for 2 years. After a short period at the Ministry of Information she began work with the Overseas Services of the BBC, remaining there for over 3 years. In 1947 she returned to the United States to help set up the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. Bowerman suffered a stroke in 1972 and died at home on 18 Oct 1973, aged 83.

Everild Mary Feeny (1911-fl 2000) was born on 15 Mar 1911 into a large Catholic family in Merseyside. She trained at the Liverpool College of Art from 1926 to 1932, winning painting scholarships in 1928 and 1929. She taught in many parts of England, retiring in 1973. She exhibited her art in London and Paris and held six solo exhibitions in Liverpool. She painted a mural (9.25 (w) x 3.65 (h) metres) of the Resurrection in the Church of Our Redeemer at Selfors in central Norway in 1971. With a strong interest in theatre, she was a scenic designer and a director of amateur plays in Liverpool including 'Tartuffe' with Leonard Rossiter, and won the Theatre Clwyd, Mold, three-day amateur festival in 1986 with her own play 'Keep lookin' up!'. In 1977 she began writing letters to the Roman Catholic press, and later joined several campaigning organisations with the same aims in both the United Kingdom and in the United States of America. A number of articles by her were published and she was interviewed on BBC Radio 4 programme 'Women's Hour' in 1995. She inaugurated the Catholic Women's Ordination Day in the UK in 1993 which became an annual event on every second Saturday in September c 1990s. Everild was an Associate of Notre Dame de Namur and she wrote two books: Peeps Round the World Diary published in Mar 1995 which describes a trip around the world; Deist Catechism of Christian Doctrine was published in Mar 1996.

Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst (1882-1960) was the second daughter of Richard Marsden Pankhurst (1835-1898) and Emmeline Pankhurst née Goulden (1858-1928). She was educated at Southport High School for Girls and Manchester High School for Girls and trained as an artist at the Manchester Municipal School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. Sylvia, along with the rest of her family, was socially and politically active. Initially she became involved in the Independent Labour Party and in the militant activities of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), which had been founded by her mother and her sister, Christabel. In 1912/1913 she founded the East London Federation of the Suffragettes (from 1916 The Workers Suffrage Federation and from 1918 the Workers Socialist Federation) and also became increasingly involved with social welfare work in the East End of London. As a pacifist, during the First World War Sylvia became a member of the Executive Committee of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. During and after the War she became progressively more occupied with revolutionary left-wing activities, briefly joined the Communist Party, and in 1921 formed the Communist Workers Party. Throughout this period she participated in international socialist networks and her political writings were published widely, including in leading foreign socialist journals. In 1924 she left the East End and moved to Woodford Green. In the inter-war period she also became involved in assisting Italian and Jewish refugees and in supporting the republican cause in Spain. In the 1930s Sylvia continued to write extensively and also became involved in anti-fascist campaigns, organising the Women's International Matteotti Committee. In the 1930s she also became interested in Ethiopia and took up the cause of Haile Selassie, founding the New Times and Ethiopia News in 1936. In 1939 she supported the Second World War on anti-fascist grounds. In 1956 Sylvia moved to Addis Ababa and continued to write and publish. She died in Sep 1960.

Eva Stephenson was an Irish suffragette, who was imprisoned in Holloway. After her prison sentence she lived in a small village, Delgany, in County Wicklow. She was employed in an office doing secretarial work. She married Maurice Wilkins, a teacher from Dublin, c.1913.

Miss Goodfellow (fl 1896-1979) was born c 1895, in Forest Hill, South London. Like her mother, she became a seamstress when she left school, working for others at first before becoming self-employed, working for private clients. As London expanded and people moved away to other areas, Miss Goodfellow bought a car in 1934 in order to be able to follow her clients. One of the clients was the mother of the filmmaker Julius Hogben, who interviewed her in 1978, when she was aged 82. This became a 24-minute colour documentary that was screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival in 1979. He and Miss Goodfellow attended this event, which produced an article entitled, 'Miss Goodfellow Goes to Hollywood'.

Hugh Franklin (1889-1962) was born on 27 May 1889 at 28 Pembridge Villas, Paddington, the son of Arthur Ellis Franklin, JP, a senior partner in the banking house of A Keyser and Co, and a director of several companies. The Franklins were practising members of the Jewish faith and were sufficiently prosperous to own property in the country, Chartridge Lodge, Chesham. Hugh Franklin was educated at Clifton College and in 1908 he went up to Caius College, Cambridge, where he read engineering. After his first year at Cambridge he made a break with the family tradition by declaring in a letter to his father his lack of religious belief that remained in some question for the next two years. In 1909 he attended with friends a suffrage meeting at the Queen's Hall, London, addressed by Mrs Pankhurst, Christabel Pankhurst and Mrs Pethick Lawrence, which was his first contact with the militants. During the summer he took part by selling papers in the processing from Kingsway to Hyde Park. From this he took up the suffragette practice of chalking pavements and sold papers for open-air WSPU meetings, in the Chesham area. At the beginning of the October term, 1909, Franklin decided to abandon the idea of a career in engineering that his father had intended for him and neglected his engineering studies for economics and sociology, which provoked further bitter family controversy. His interest in politics was growing and several drafts for speeches and debates exist for his years at Cambridge. Already a member of the Fabian Society and the ILP and the Cambridge Men's League for Woman Suffrage (for which he arranged meetings for Mrs Fawcett and Lady McLaren), he joined the Men's Political Union for Women's Enfranchisement on 22 Feb 1910. He provoked further dispute with his family by finally abandoning religious observance and by declaring his intention of not returning to Cambridge. After persuasion Franklin did return to Cambridge, but devoted all his energies to organising a meeting for Mrs Pankhurst in May at the Cambridge Guildhall and he was disciplined by his College authorities for his attempts at publicising it. On 26 May 1910 he joined the Young Purple White and Green Club. He took little trouble over his final examinations and missed some papers, as he was helping the MPU in London to organise for a Suffrage Procession from the Embankment to the Albert Hall and 'came down for good' from Cambridge at the end of June. In the following months, Franklin took an even more active part in WSPU and MPU meetings, both speaking and organising. He accepted reluctantly (after an initial refusal), an offer from Sir Matthew Nathan, Secretary to the Post Office, to be his private secretary (his uncle, Herbert Samuel, was Postmaster-General at the time). He gave evidence at the trial of Victor Duval, arrested in connection with an attempted protest at a meeting of Lloyd George's, at the Temple in October. He was among those present and was himself arrested during the events of 'Black Friday' (18 Nov 1910), at which large scale brutality by the police was alleged to have taken place when members of the WSPU attempted a mass lobby of Parliament. Franklin was among those who were discharged but he considered Winston Churchill, Home Secretary, personally responsible for police orders and was determined to make his protest. He was among those who interrupted Churchill's meeting at Highbury on 22 Nov 1910 and at Bradford on 26 Nov 1910, being ejected on both occasions. On the same train as Churchill returning from the Bradford meeting, Franklin approached Churchill with a dog whip and attempted to strike him, saying 'Take this, you cur, for the treatment of the suffragists'. For this offence, Franklin received six weeks imprisonment, the first of the three terms which he was to receive during the next three years for militant protests and which also caused his dismissal as Sir Matthew Nathan's Secretary. Franklin's activities were, from November 1910-1913 directed exclusively towards work for the Men's Political Union, as Honorary Assistant Organiser, while in Nov 1911 he resigned from the NUWSS affiliated Men's League for Women's Suffrage, being in disagreement with the League's reliance on a suffrage amendment to the Government's Reform Bill.

His second militant protest in Mar 1911 was that of throwing a stone at Churchill's house in Eccleston Square, for which he received a further month in prison and was forcibly fed throughout his term. The third and most dramatic of Hugh Franklin's acts of militancy consisted of setting fire to a railway carriage at Harrow station on 25 Oct 1912, for which he was sentenced to nine months in prison. Refusing food during his imprisonment, he was forcibly fed over 100 times and was the first suffragette prisoner to be released, in May 1913, under the Prisoners (Temporary Release for Ill-health) Act, 1913, more familiarly known as the 'Cat and Mouse Act'. Breaking his parole, Franklin escaped to the Continent, where he stayed under the alias of 'Henry Forster' until shortly after the outbreak of war. Franklin was disqualified for war service on grounds of eyesight and served on the staff of the Ordnance Factories, Woolwich. On 28 Sep 1915 he married Elsie Duval, sister of his MPU colleague Victor Duval, but she died only months after the War ended, on 1 Jan 1919, from heart failure, partly the result over the years of her own experience of forcible feeding. After the War he entered the timber trade and took no further part in politics until 1931 when he left business for writing and rejoined formally the Labour Party. In the 1931 General Election he contested Hornsey and in 1935, St Albans, unsuccessfully on both occasions. After standing in a number of local government elections, he won a seat on the Middlesex County Council in 1946. From 1934-1949 he held various co-opted and elected positions on committees of the LCC, Middlesex County Council and Metropolitan Water Board. He also held office in the New Fabian Research Bureau, the National Executive of the Labour Part and on boards of governors of schools and on hospital management committees. Franklin's imprisonment for his militant suffragette offences led him to a deep and abiding interest in penal reform. In addition to membership of the Howard League, he submitted a memorandum to his uncle, Herbert Samuel, when Home Secretary in 1932, and wrote a play 'On Remand' which he endeavoured to have produced in the theatre or filmed, but without success. In 1921 Hugh Franklin married a second time, Elsie Constance Tuke at Lewisham Register Office. He died 21 Oct 1962.

Elsie Duval (1892-1919) was born in 1892, the daughter of Ernest and Emily Duval who together with their children were keen suffragists. Duval joined the Women's Social & Political Union in 1907, the year after her mother. Unlike her mother, however, she did not leave the organisation to join the Women's Freedom League when the Pankhursts changed the constitution, but the mother and daughter did work together for three years in the Men's Political Union for Women's Enfranchisement which Victor Duval, Elsie's brother, founded. The younger female Duval was arrested on the 23 Nov 1911 for obstructing the police. After this event, she was officially accepted by the Women's Social & Political Union (WSPU) as a militant protest volunteer. On 27 Jun 1912, Duval was arrested for smashing a Clapham Post Office window. Subsequently she was remanded for one week in custody 'for the state of her mind to be enquired into', and then sentenced to one month in the third division at Holloway, during which time she was forcibly fed nine times before being released on the 3 Aug 1912. She was arrested again in Apr 1913 for loitering with intent (with Phyllis Brady) and was again sent to prison for a month. She was forcibly fed during both remand and whilst serving her sentence, being seriously ill throughout and often resisting strenuously. Her prison diary for this year refers to 'pain at the heart' after one of these incidents. She was released under the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health) Act, 1913, (commonly known as the 'Cat and Mouse' Act) which allowed for prisoners to return to prison on recovery. Duval was the first prisoner released from Holloway under the Act and the second to be released (Hugh Franklin) was the first) from any prison. During her last imprisonment (according to Hugh Franklin's biographical notes) a charge was being prepared for burning Lady White's house at Egham, with 'Phyllis Brady', (Olive Beamish) for which the latter received five years' imprisonment. Duval burnt also Sanderstead station and other places, before her arrest, together with 'Phyllis Brady'. Duval narrowly avoided arrest on her final release, instead, she and her fiancé Hugh Franklin left for France to avoid the re-imprisonment that her terms of temporary release had demanded. She spent several months working as 'Eveline Dukes' in Germany, Belgium and Switzerland armed with false testimonials provided by friends. She was only able to return to Britain at the outbreak of the First World War when a general amnesty was granted to suffragettes. After this she became active in the war work of the WSPU. She and Hugh Franklin were finally married in a Jewish ceremony at the London Synagogue in Sep 1915. Two years later, she joined the Pankhursts' Women's Party, but died on the 1 Jan 1919 of heart failure, a victim of the influenza epidemic.

Isobel Denby (fl 1905-1912) was an author active at the end of the nineteenth century. She appears to have undertaken a correspondence with a clergyman from 1905 to 1911. From this emerges a woman who is critical of the contemporary teaching of the Church of England on women. She specifically suggests revisions to the marriage service and advances thoughts on the role of women in the economic system of the time and in the ministry. The intense intellectual relationship between the author and the clergyman seems to have been ended in 1911 through the intervention of a female friend and the correspondence was published the following year as 'Unconventional Talks with a Modern DD Letters Sent and Unsent'.

Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp (1982-2000) was formed in response to NATO's decision in 1979 to base ground cruise missiles at Greenham Common. RAF Greenham Common had first became home to the US Army Air Force in Nov 1943, when the 354th Fighter Group moved in as part of the Allies efforts to meet the Nazi Government's aerial operations. Greenham Common, near Newbury in Berkshire, became a bomber operational training unit. Following the invasion of France, the Americans transferred their resources to France and Greenham Common reverted to RAF control until it was closed in 1946. However, as the Cold War began, it was reopened in 1951 as a US Strategic Air Command, coming into American Air Force operational control in Jun 1953. It was closed once more in 1961 only to be reopened in 1964, when it also became a NATO standby base. NATO's decision in 1979 to base ground cruise missiles at Greenham Common was a response to the proliferation of nuclear forces, which occurred throughout that decade. It was in the wake of this announcement that the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp opened at this site. In Sep 1981 a Welsh group of 36 individuals opposed to nuclear power, called Women for Life on Earth, walked 120 miles from their headquarters to raise awareness of this issue and to protest against NATO's decision to site cruise missiles at Greenham Common. On reaching their destination they chained themselves to the perimeter fence and subsequently established a 'peace camp' there which was to remain for another two decades. The 'camp' itself consisted of nine smaller camps: the first was Yellow Gate, established the month after Women for Peace on Earth reached the airbase; others established in 1983 were Green Gate, the nearest to the silos, and the only entirely exclusive women-only camp at all times, the others accepting male visitors during the day; Turquoise Gate; Blue Gate with its new age focus; Pedestrian Gate; Indigo Gate; Violet Gate identified as being religiously focussed; Red Gate known as the artists gate; and Orange Gate. A central core of women lived either full-time or for stretches of time at any one of the gate camps with others staying for various lengths of time. From the beginning, links were formed with local feminist and anti-nuclear groups across the country while early support was received from the Women's Peace Alliance in order to facilitate these links and give publicity through its newsletter. In Mar 1982 the first blockade of the base occurred, staged by 250 women and during which 34 arrests were made. In May the first attempt to evict the peace camp was made as bailiffs and police attempted to clear the women and their possessions from the site. However, the camp was simply re-located to a nearby site. That same year, in Feb 1982 the camp went onto a women only footing and in Dec 1982, in response to chain letter sent out by organisers 30,000 women assembled to surround the site and 'embrace the base'. In Jan 1983 Newbury District Council revoked the common land bylaws for Greenham Common, becoming the private landlord for the site and instituting Court proceedings to reclaim eviction costs, actions that were ruled as illegal by the House of Lords in 1990.

In Apr 1991, CND supporters staged action which involved 70,000 people forming a 14-mile human chain linking Burghfield, Aldermaston and Greenham. However, the first transfer of cruise missiles to the airbase occurred in Nov 1983. Another major event occurred in Dec 1983 when 50,000 women encircled the base, holding up mirrors and taking down sections of the fence, resulting in hundreds of arrests. In 1987, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty was signed by the USA and the Soviet Union, and two years later in Aug 1989 the first step in the removal of cruise missiles from the Greenham Common airbase occurred, a process that was completed in Mar 1991. The American Air Force handed control of the base to the Royal Air Force in Sep 1992, who handed the base over to the Defence Land Agent three weeks later. On 1 Jan 2000 the last of the Greenham Common Women protestors left the camp. A memorial garden was erected after this - the only individual name included in the memorial was that of Helen Wynn Thomas who had died in an accident at Greenham on 5 Aug 1989.

Kathleen Courtney (1878-1974) was born in Chatham in 1878 to Alice Margaret Courtney (née Mann) and Major David Courtney of the Royal Engineers, one of seven children. She was brought up in Kensington and after attending an Anglo-French School in London, and boarding school in Malvern, she spent a year at boarding school in Dresden. She subsequently became a student in Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford in Jan 1897 where she read French and German and met Maude Royden. After graduation, she volunteered at a girls club in Lambeth before returning to Oxford to work for the University Extension Delegacy. She became active in the non-militant section of the women's suffrage movement and accepted a post as a paid secretary for the North of England Society for Women's Suffrage in 1908. Subsequently, she was elected Honorary Secretary of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies in 1911 and became a member of the first Election Fighting Fund Committee in 1912. However, after the outbreak of the First World War, she found herself in opposition to many of her colleagues within the NUWSS. The president, Millicent Fawcett, argued that members should focus on relief work as a means of showing that women would be worthy of the vote. In contrast to this, several executive members such as Isabella Ford, Maud Royden, Helena Swanwick, and Catherine Marshall wanted to oppose the war altogether. A meeting of the executive committee refused to send delegates to the International Women's Peace Congress at the Hague in Apr 1915, prompting several members of the committee to resign. Courtney was one of those. In the event, only a handful of British women were present at the Congress: Courtney herself, Chrystal Macmillan, both of whom were already in Holland, and Emmeline Pethick Lawrence, who travelled from America. There, a new organisation began, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, which formed the British branch of the International Committee for Permanent Peace. Courtney became its first vice president. In 1916 she also went to Salonika and Baxtia to carry out work with the Serbian Relief Fund for with she was later decorated by the Serbian government. After the war, Courtney helped her friend, Dr Hilda Clark, at the Friends' Relief Mission in Vienna, and also travelled to the Balkans and Poland.

In 1916 she became the joint secretary of the National Council for Adult Suffrage with James Middleton of the Independent Labour Party. Towards the end of the war, however, she rejoined the NUWSS and was re-elected to the executive committee in Mar 1918, despite her opposition to the limited nature of the franchise that was at last being offered to women. With the new electoral situation, the objectives of women's movement had to change and a new organisation emerged: the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship. Courtney became a member of the executive committee and as such attended the conference on the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship in Paris in 1923. In the 1930s she went on to become Vice President of NUSEC. However, this was a time when there was no consensus within the women's movement regarding the appropriate response to 'protective' legislation that applied only to women and had been created with the aim of 'protecting' them against industrial exploitation. An ideological split occurred at this time between those, on the one hand, who supported ideas such as an 'Endowment of Motherhood' being paid to women to ensure their financial independence and, on the other, those who adopted a more strictly equalist position. In the mid-1920s, the Labour government proposed a series of bills which would extend this protective legislation and many members of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship of the time were keen to change its equalist policies to support the status of women in this manner. Unlike some, who left to form other organisations in opposition to this position, Courtney remained in the group and even went on to chair the committee of the Family Endowment Council, which shared many of these perspectives. However, her work on the status of women did not end her peace activities at this time, and she soon became the president of the British Section of the Women's International League for Peace & Freedom, and organiser of the Women's Pilgrimage for Peace of 1926. Courtney was also active in the international effort that culminated in the presentation of a petition signed by several millions to the Disarmament Conference of 1932 and she was an observer at the conference on behalf of several women's organisations. In 1928 she was appointed to the executive of the League of Nations Union, of which she became the vice-chair in 1939. It was in this capacity that she travelled the world as a speaker in the 1930s. During the Second World War she worked with the Ministry of Information, particularly in relation to the UK's relations with the United States of America in that period. When the United Nations was formed after the war, she became its deputy Chair and was awarded the CBE in 1947. In 1949 she was elected Chair and joint president of the United Nations Association. She retired in 1951 from the organisation, but remained active in its work into her nineties. At the age of 80 she undertook a trip to the United States and Canada. In her 90s she was still an active participant in UNA business. Close friends of Courtney's included Agnes Maude Royden, Gilbert Murray, the classical scholar, and Lord Robert Cecil. Courtney was created Dame 1952. She died 7 Dec 1974.

Kitty Marion (1871-1944) was born Katherina Maria Schafer in Westphalia in 1871. Her mother died when she was two years old and when she was fifteen went to live with her aunt in England. She learnt English and it became clear that her ambition was to become a music hall actress, which she achieved three years later in 1889 when she was cast in a pantomime in Glasgow. She joined the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) in around 1908, taking part in their marches on parliament and selling copies of their journal 'Votes for Women' in the street. When the Actress' Franchise League began in 1909, she was one of the first members. That same year she was arrested for the first time. The second arrest came in Newcastle a few months later when she threw a stone through the window of a post office, an offence for which she received a month's prison sentence. In Holloway jail she was force fed and reacted by setting her cell on fire. Further attacks on property ranging from breaking windows (Mar 1912) and a fire alarm (late 1912) to burning properties (Levetleigh House in Sussex in Apr 1913, the Grand Stand at Hurst Park racecourse in Jun 1913, various houses in Liverpool in Aug 1913 and Manchester in Nov 1913). These incidents resulted in a series of further terms of imprisonment during which force-feeding occurred followed by release under the Cat and Mouse Act. Fellow WSPU workers finally took her to Paris in May 1914. At the outbreak of war in Aug 1914, Marion's position became doubly uncertain: firstly, there was some question, soon dropped, of returning the suffragette prisoners to jail to serve the rest of their term; secondly Marion was a German by birth and therefore suspect. Despite briefly resuming her career on the stage, she was finally deported, going to America in 1915 where she would spend most of her remaining years. There she quickly became active in the family planning movement and after 1917, she began working with the Birth Control Review published by New York Women's Publishing Company under Margaret Sanger. Marion, with her experience selling 'Votes for Women', became a street hawker, selling the Review in New York for 13 years. She was arrested several times for violating obscenity laws, and was imprisoned for 30 days in 1918. She was granted US citizenship in 1924. She returned to London in 1930 to attend the unveiling of the statue to Mrs Pankhurst and began work in the Birth Control International Centre under Edith How Martyn. However, she finally returned to New York where she worked in Sanger's office once more before retiring to the Margaret Sanger Home in New York State where she died in 1944.

Kay Pilpel (fl 1930s) grew up in the Jewish community of Stamford Hill, London, in the 1930s as the daughter of a lithographer. She attended Tottenham High School for Girls.

Annie Lacon (1880-1968) was born in Birmingham in 1880. She attended a meeting in Birmingham in 1906 at which Emmeline Pankhurst was a speaker and immediately became the first member of the Birmingham branch of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). There she also met the man who was to become her husband. In 1907 she was selected as a delegate from Birmingham sent to protest at the House of Commons. During this event on the 20 Mar 1907, she was arrested with around seventy other women and charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. The following day she was tried and fined five shilling which she refused to pay. She was then held for fourteen days in solitary confinement. She subsequently continued as a member of the WSPU, later giving birth to a daughter whom she named Emmeline. This occurred two months after the death of her husband and she subsequently went to live with her sister before moving to Northampton in 1948 where her daughter was employed. She remained a member of the Labour party there until the end of her life, as well as belonging to the Northampton Business and Professional Women's Club. Lacon was also a member of the Women's Freedom League and birth-control campaigner. She died in 1968.

Louie Luker (1873-1971) was born in Kensington in London in 1873 to a family of artists. She studied art in Bushey, in Hertfordshire, under Hubert von Herkomer from 1900-1903 but emigrated to South Africa in 1904. There she worked as a painter before marrying Philip Burrell, only returning to Britain in 1908 for the birth of her daughter, Philippa. Her husband died in Durban before being able to join her. In London, she resumed her career as a portraitist and achieved considerable success as a society artist. She was also the General Secretary of Artists' Suffrage League. She became ill in 1912, subsequently recovering during a trip to Canada. Her career in Britain ended abruptly in 1914 when commissions stopped as the First World War began. In the light of this, she travelled to California where she spent the rest of the war and where she found a new audience. She returned to London in 1919 but was unable to find work. Instead she rented out rooms and became a cook until 1923 when she came to the attention of Mrs Stanley who became her patron. She travelled to India in 1928 where she painted members of the ruling classes including the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, and Field Marshall Sir William Birdwood. However, her career ended soon after due to ill health. She died in 1971.

Louisa Garrett Anderson (1873-1943) was the daughter of James Skelton and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. She had one brother, Alan Garrett Anderson, and a sister, Margaret, who died of meningitis in 1875. She was educated at St Leonard's School (May 1888-Apr 1891) and later Bedford College (1890-1893). In 1892 she entered the London School of Medicine for Women, and qualified with a MB in 1897, and BS in 1898. In 1900 she gained her MD. Louisa did a postgraduate year at Johns Hopkins, Baltimore in 1902. As well as becoming established as a doctor Louisa was politically active, taking a keen interest in suffrage activities, like many of her family. She was a member of: the London Society for Women's Suffrage; the London Graduates' Union for Women's Suffrage (where she chaired the inaugural meeting); the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU); the United Suffragists (Vice-President); and the National Political League.On 4 Mar 1912 Anderson smashed a window in Rutland Gate in protest at a speech made by an anti-suffragist Cabinet minister. She was arrested and sent to Holloway Prison for 6 weeks with hard labour (later reduced to one month by direct intervention of the Home Office).

Louisa founded the Women's Hospital for Children, 688 Harrow Road, with Dr Flora Murray, in 1912. Murray was a former student of the London School of Medicine for Women, also an active supporter of the WSPU, and it is likely that the two women met in the course of their suffrage work. Louisa was also on the staff at the New Hospital for Women as an assistant surgeon.In Aug 1914, together with Flora Murray, Louisa founded the Women's Hospital Corps, under the auspices of the French Red Cross. Louisa was the Chief Surgeon. The two women established a hospital in the Hotel Claridge in Paris, which ran from Sep 1914 to Jan 1915. In Nov 1914 they were asked to open a second hospital at Wimereux, under the Royal Army Medicine Corps (RAMC), which also ran until early 1915. They were then offered hospital premises in London, so closed both hospitals in France and returned to England. The Endell Street Military Hospital, the first hospital in the UK established expressly for men by women, ran from May 1915 until Dec 1919, and during that time treated over 26,000 patients, 24,000 of them male. The hospital has been largely forgotten today, partly because of its relatively small size, and partly because of its anomalous position as a women-run institution in a largely hostile RAMC. The best source of the activities of the Women's Hospital Corps in World War One is the account by Flora Murray, published in 1920: Women as Army Surgeons: being the history of the Women's Hospital Corps in Paris, Wimereux and Endell Street, Sep 1914-Oct 1919 (London: Hodder and Stoughton). In 1917 Murray and Anderson were awarded the CBE for their war work.Flora Murray was Louisa Garrett Anderson's close friend and companion from about 1910 until Murray's death in 1923. They jointly owned a house, Paul End, at Penn in Buckinghamshire. Before meeting Murray, Anderson had had a close relationship with the suffragist Evelyn Sharp - there are a few passionate letters from Anderson in the Evelyn Sharp Papers in the Bodleian Library. In her diary, Evelyn Sharp describes how she wrote an obituary of Anderson, published in the Manchester Guardian (a copy is in the Women's Library Biographical Press Cuttings collection). After the war the two women continued to work at their hospital in the Harrow Road until forced to close it because of lack of funds in 1921. They then retired to the country.

Murray had a brief illness in 1923 and was diagnosed with rectal carcinoma. She had a series of operations at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital and died at a nursing home in Belsize Park in 1923. Anderson continued to live at Penn. She was a magistrate, and remained interested in women's issues. When war broke out she let her house and came to London to stay with Louie Brook, former Secretary of the London School of Medicine for Women, in Russell Square. She was given a place on the surgical staff at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital. In 1943 she was found to have disseminated malignant disease, and was taken to a nursing home in Brighton, where she died on 15 Nov 1943. Louisa was cremated at Brighton and her ashes scattered there, but her family arranged for an inscription commemorating her friendship and work with Flora Murray to be placed on the latter's tombstone in the churchyard at Holy Trinity, Penn.

Lois Lang-Sims (fl 1936-1995) was a distant relation of Agnes Maude Royden and a member of her congregation at the Guildhall in 1936. Through this, the two became friends until the latter's death. Lang-Sims had a strong interest in spiritual matters, which was exhibited in a number of books which she published over a series of decades from One Thing Only: A Christian Guide to the Universal Quest for God, to The presence of Tibet in 1963 and Canterbury Cathedral in 1979. She also had a brief friendship with the writer Charles Williams whose letters to her were published as Letters to Lalage in 1989.

ME Roberts (fl 1881-1968) was born around 1881. She became a member of the Sheffield branch of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) around 1906 before leaving this to join the local branch of the Women's Freedom League which came into being around Dec 1908 after Charlotte Despard and her associates followers broke away from the Pankhursts and other WSPU's leaders. Roberts seems to have taken part in the Pageant of Women that was held in Sheffield in 1910. She would later become the local secretary of the Sheffield WFL. In 1909 she took part in a deputation to 10 Downing Street to hand in a petition to the Prime Minister. She kept an interest in the militant suffrage movement throughout the 1930s, keeping in correspondence with the Record Room of the Suffragette Fellowship. In 1940 she moved to Liverpool where she lived for the rest of her life. She retired to a home around 1968.

Lady Mary Gertrude Emmott (1886-1954) was born Mary Lees in Oldham in 1866. She was the daughter of John William Lees and Elizabeth Lees and was educated at Queen's College in London. She married the Liberal MP Lord Alfred Emmott in 1887, with whom she had two daughters. She became the Mayoress of Oldham in 1891, the same year that she became one of the original members of the Board of the Oldham branch of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. This social welfare work was to continue through her life, she was the first woman to be elected to the Oldham Board of Guardians in 1898 and went on to represent the Women's Industrial Council on the Council of the National Association of Women's Lodging Houses in 1910. During the First World War she was involved in organising aid to Belgian refugees and in its aftermath she was appointed to the Chair of the Women's Subcommittee Advisory Council by the Ministry of Reconstruction. Her interest in housing was continued by her work as a member of the Housing Advisory Council overseen by the Ministry of Health, membership of the Advisory Council of the Local Government Board on Housing in 1919, membership of the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association from 1932-3 and presidency of the Women's Homes Association in the 1930s. Emmott was also active in the area of women's status. She helped establish a branch of the National Council of Women in Oldham in 1897 and became the vice-chair of the Women's National Liberation Foundation. Later she would be successively a member of the Executive committee, president of the London branch and the Chair of the National Council of Women's Parliamentary Legislation Committee before being appointed acting vice-president in 1927 and president from the following year until 1938. She was also closely associated with the London Society for Women's Suffrage, as a member of the Executive Council from the end of the nineteenth century to its transformation into the Fawcett Society in 1951, of which she was elected President months before her death in 1954.

Margaret Heitland (1860-1938) was born in 1860, the daughter of the Rev WH Bateson DD, Master of St John, College, Cambridge University, and his wife Anna Aitkin. Margaret was educated at Highfield School, Hendon and in Heidelberg, Germany. She and her two sisters, Anna and Mary Bateson were involved with the women's suffrage movement alongside their mother. When the Cambridge Women's Suffrage Association was formed in 1884, Margaret Bateson was appointed the first honorary assistant Secretary. However, her main interest was journalism and she entered the profession in 1886. Two years later she began working for the Queen magazine, where she remained for most of her career. In Jan 1888 she organised a campaign of meetings in various towns for the Women's Suffrage Society and in 1895 she was editor of a collection of interviews, which was published under the title of 'Professional Women upon their Professions'. She married William Emmerton Heitland MA, Fellow of St John's College, in Jul 1901 but continued her work after this time and was elected to the executive committee of the Cambridge Association of Women's Suffrage the following year. She supported the Association financially, paying the costs of a Secretary for seven months in 1905. In Dec 1908 she was asked to speak at a private meeting in Bedford which led to the founding of the Bedford Society for Women's Suffrage. It was in Bedford in 1912 that she also spoke to members of the local branch of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies in support of the national organisation's Election Fighting Fund which was aimed at supporting Labour Party candidates in seats where an anti-suffrage Liberal candidate was standing. By 1913 she was the president of the Cambridge Women's Suffrage Association, a member of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies Executive committee and vice president of the Central Bureau for the Employment of Women, which she had helped to found and on whose behalf she had lectured on women's employment since 1906. In 1920, Heitland was a member of the standing committee of the Cambridge branch of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship. She died in 1938.

Millie Browne (fl.1881-1918) (later Millie Braine Price) was born on Christmas Day, 25 Dec 1881, in London. She was the daughter of the baritone Walter Browne and his wife. Mrs Browne left her husband around 1884 and moved to York where her daughter grew up and went to Castlegate College. In 1895 her mother inherited a sum of money and was able to both divorce her husband and send her daughter to the Priory Street School, here the younger Browne became a pupil-teacher. A Quaker, from around this time, she became involved with the Labour movement and attended a number of meetings before being awarded a Queen's Scholarship. Failing to enter Stockwell College, she attended Swansea Training College until 1902. Thereafter she became a teacher at a number of schools in Leeds before moving back to York in 1904 where she also taught at the Seacroft School for a time. It was during a visit to London in 1907 that she heard speeches given by members of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) in Hyde Park and quickly became a member of the organisation. In Aug 1907 she was posted to Bristol to work on a suffrage campaign there with Annie Kenney and work in the suffrage shop in the town. She was offered a position as a WSPU organiser that she rejected before returning to her mother's home in Letchworth where she also campaigned. The following Aug 1908 she returned to Bristol to continue her activities. She took part in a series of parades in London and was arrested in one particular raid on the Houses of Parliament. She went on to be posted to Derbyshire during a by-election and to Llandudno and Southport as a helper before her activities tailed off as she became both concerned about the increasing violence of the methods used by the group and more interested in the work of the Labour Party. She went on to marry Charles Price, the son of the famous jeweller, and continued to attend local meetings of the WSPU until the outbreak of the First World War. Since she and her husband had become Quakers, she spent the war teaching while he became a conscientious objector and was posted to a hospital unit in Belgium. The fate of both after the war is unknown.

Mary Sheepshanks was born in Liverpool in 1872, one of fourteen children. Her father, the Rev Sheepshanks, was a Church of England vicar who, in 1890, became the Bishop of Norwich. She attended the Liverpool High School until she was seventeen and then was sent to Germany for a year before returning to attend Newnham College, Cambridge in 1892. On graduation, Sheepshanks became involved in social work in Southwark for the Women's University Settlement for two years. She continued this work in Stepney before becoming the Vice Principal, then Principal, of the Morley Memorial College for Working Men and Women in 1897. In 1907 she asked Emmeline Pankhurst to give a lecture on women's suffrage at the College and began the practice of organising women-only meetings for female students as well as holding college debates and lectures on the topic. In 1908 she attended the International Woman Suffrage Association congress which took place in Holland and by 1913 had been asked to undertake a lecture tour of Western and Central Europe for the organisation. This culminated in her attendance at the IWSA's 1913 meeting in Budapest, where she was asked to become the IWSA's secretary in London and where she also edited its journal, 'Jus Sufragii'.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Sheepshanks maintained a pacifist stance while the major suffrage societies undertook war work despite, a few months before, having worked with her on the International Manifesto of Women and the demonstrations for peace in August 1914. In October, she was the one who signed an editorial in Jus Suffragii entitled 'Patriotism or Internationalism' which attacked the war. However, when Belgium was overrun, she organised aid to Belgian refugees and helped stranded German women find safe refuges through her International Women's Relief Committee. Through her editorship, Jus Suffragii maintained a strictly neutral position throughout the conflict while attacking the war itself. This led her into difficulties that came to head over the International Women's Peace Conference held in The Hague in 1915 and which caused a damaging split within the suffrage movement. Like many, Sheepshanks applied for a passport to attend but was unable to attend due to the closure of the North Sea shipping lanes. Instead, Sheepshanks concentrated on the question of post-war reconstruction, working with the Union of Democratic Control and celebrated the coming of the Russian Revolution in 1917 in the pages of Jus Suffragii. However, after the end of the war, Sheepshanks resigned from its editorship and became the secretary of the Fight the Famine Council, lobbying the League of Nations meting at Geneva on its behalf in 1920. She also became a member of the British executive committee of the Women's International League at this time. They following year she took a holiday to South America and studied the economic and social conditions in the area, returning to Europe via the United States.

In 1927, Sheepshanks became the International Secretary of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom at their office in Geneva, monitoring the cases of political prisoners and attending meetings of the League of Nations Council on its behalf. In September 1928 she led a deputation of the WILPF to the Secretariat of the League to present a memorandum on disarmament before organising a conference on the use of modern chemical weapons and their use against civilian s in Frankfurt-am-Maine the following January. In September 1930 she organised a conference on statelessness attended by the International Council of Women, the Society of Friends, the International Suffrage Alliance, the League of Rights for Man and the League of Nations Union. However, she resigned from the post in December due to disagreements over policy between her and the more left-wing French and German members of the Executive Council. However, she remained a member and was commissioned in November of that year to carry out a fact-finding mission alongside Helen Oppenheimer to East Galicia and Poland to investigate reports of atrocities carried out by the government. Here she carried out covert interviews before reporting back and publicising their finding throughout Europe.

She moved back to London in 1932 where, two years later, she became interested in the question of the status of women and created a report on the admission of omen to the diplomatic and consular services. During the 1930s, Sheepshanks became involved with organising relief for child victims of the Spanish Civil War and her home became a safe-house for refugees. During the Second World War, she renounced her pacifism in the face of the threat of Nazism, gave English classes and discussion groups for female refugees and was employed as a German translator by the BBC. Chronic arthritis, blindness and the need to undergo an operation for cancer blighted her later years and it was as a form of therapy that her doctor suggested to her that, at the age of 83, she might write her still unpublished autobiography. She died in 1958.

Olive Chandler (fl 1945) appears to have had an interest in several women's groups in the period at the end of the Second World War. She apparently contacted both the National Council of Women and the National Federation of Women's Institutes to gain more information about their structures and their aims before collecting the material that they, in turn, sent her.

Philippa Strachey (1872-1968), known as Pippa, was born in 1872 to Lady Jane Maria Strachey and Major Richard Strachey. She was brought up first in India, where her father was a leading figure in the administration, and then in London, where the family moved in 1879. Her mother was active in the movement for women's suffrage and both Philippa and her siblings were encouraged to contribute to this work. In 1906 she became a member of the executive committee of the Central Society for Women's Suffrage and the following year she was elected the secretary of its successor the London Society for Women's Suffrage. In 1906 she joined the London Society for Women's Suffrage, succeeding Edith Palliser as secretary the following year. It was also in 1907 that she joined her mother Lady Jane Maria Strachey in organising what became known as the 'Mud March' at the instigation of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies and which went from Hyde Park to the Exeter Hall to demand the vote. During the First World War she was deeply involved in various war works, from being the secretary of the Women's Service Bureau for War Workers to participating as a member of the Committee for the London units of the Scottish Women's Hospital from 1914-1919. This war work began her lasting involvement with the issue of women's employment and she remained the secretary of the Women's Service Bureau after 1918 when it became concerned with helping women thrown out of jobs on the return of men from the Front. She remained there until its dissolution, which came in 1922, caused by a financial crisis in the parent organisation. However, subsequently Strachey helped to found a new group to fill the gap, becoming the secretary and then honorary secretary of the Women's Employment Federation. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, family problems took up much of her time as she nursed both her mother and her brother Lytton until their deaths. However, all through this time she remained active in the London Society for Women's Service and when it was renamed the Fawcett Society in 1951, she was asked to be its honorary secretary. It was that year that she was awarded the CBE for her work for women. She subsequently was made a governor of Bedford College. Increasing ill-health slowed the pace of her work and blindness finally forced her to enter a nursing home at the end of her life. She died in 1968.

Dr Patricia Shaw (fl 1948-1965) was employed by the Boots Pure Drug Company and investigated the health of shopworkers.

Sheila Rowbotham (1943-) was born in Leeds, West Yorkshire in 1943 and attended St Hilda's College at the University of Oxford and then the University of London. Upon leaving university she began her career lecturing in Liberal Studies at Chelsea College of Advanced Technology and Tower Hamlets College of Further Education. She then worked for several years as an Extra Mural Lecturer for London University. Rowbotham's political activism began with her involvement in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the British Labour Party's youth wing, the Young Socialists. Among her left-wing political activities was her work on the editorial board of the radical political paper 'Black Dwarf'. Towards the end of the 1960s she helped to start the Women's Liberation Movement. Active in the London Women's Liberation Workshop and a member of the Arsenal Group, Rowbotham was also involved in the campaign to unionise night cleaners, in the National Abortion Campaign (NAC) and in the National Child Care Campaign. In 1969 her influential pamphlet 'Women's Liberation and the New Politics' argued that Socialist theory needed to consider the oppression of women in cultural as well as economic terms. This was a key text in the emerging women's movement and she subsequently wrote an influential series of articles and books on this and related topics, including 'Woman, Resistance and Revolution' and 'Woman's Consciousness, Man's World' (both published in 1973). Also published in 1973 was 'Hidden from History: 300 years of Women's Oppression and the Fight against it' just one of her writings that contributed to the small group of historians who pioneered women's history. Rowbotham produced numerous books and articles expanding upon her theory, which argued that as women's oppression was a result of both economic and cultural forces then a dualist perspective (socialist feminism), which examine both the public and private sphere, was required to work towards liberation. She was a key organiser and author of the conference and book called Beyond the fragments: feminism and the making of socialism (London, Merlin Press, 1979), which attempted to draw together democratic socialist and socialist feminist currents in the UK. In 1981 she was appointed as a Visiting Professor in Women's Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Between 1983 and 1986 she worked as a research officer for the Greater London Council's Industry and Employment Department, producing a newspaper, 'Jobs for a Change', and contributing to the London Industrial Strategy. This led to an invitation to become Consultant Research Adviser for the Women's Programme, World Institute for Development Economics Research, (WIDER) at the United Nations University. She initiated a project which examined the conditions of poor women's casualised work internationally, involving activists and academics. This attracted interest among policy makers in Canada, Finland and India, and led to a project directed by Professor Swasti Mitter at UNU INTECH on women and technology. Between 1987 and 1989 she was also Course Tutor on the Women's Studies MA at the University of Kent and a Visiting Professor at the University of Paris VIII. This was followed by a Visiting Professorship in the Political Economy Department at Carleton University in 1993. Rowbotham moved to the University of Manchester as a Simon Research Fellow in 1993-1994, returning as a University Research Fellow in 1995, later becoming Professor of Gender and Labour History, Sociology. She lectured extensively in the North America, Brazil, Europe and India and her work was translated into many languages, including Chinese, Arabic and Hebrew. A symposium on Rowbotham's historical work was organised at the American Historical Association in 1994 and has been the subject of various articles, essays and theses internationally. She was given an honorary doctorate by North London University (now London Metropolitan University) and in 2004 elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. As at 2007 Rowbotham was on the Working Lives Centre Group at London Metropolitan University and the Workers' Institute Advisory Panel (Black Country Living Museum). In this period she continued to help groups involved with the organisation of home workers in Britain and internationally and supported the work of Women Working World Wide.

No further details are known about Phyllis Vickers.

Visnews (fl 1950-1985) was an international film and television news agency, operating from the 1950s until it was taken over by Reuters in 1985. It was later re-named Reuters Television.

In the early nineteenth century it was impossible for women to practice as doctors in Great Britain. The alternative choice of nursing was seen as a corrupt profession of the unskilled and the lower classes until the middle of the century. Both attitudes were caused by women's lack of access to training in the profession, largely through the parallel lack of access to training in universities and colleges that were only open to men. The one role open to them, midwifery, was constantly undermined and devalued due to this very lack of university education involved in learning its skills. In America the situation was slightly different: the English-born Elizabeth Blackwell had become the first woman in the United States to qualify as a doctor though rejection by male colleagues forced her to set up a women's hospital in New York. Visits to London in the 1850s led to work at the St Bartholomew's Hospital and friendship with Florence Nightingale. In 1859 the General Medical Council admitted her to the Medical Register but the following year a special GMC charter made it possible to exclude doctors with foreign medical degrees, leaving women who had qualified on foreign soil open to attack. Nonetheless, in 1869 Blackwell moved permanently to London and there established the London School of Medicine for Women in 1870, as well as the National Health Society. Blackwell's influence on British women intending to enter medicine was already great: in 1862 the Female Medical Society was established and Elizabeth Garrett decided to enter the profession under her advice. However, Garrett's initial attempts to enter several medical schools failed due to the continuing refusal of universities to accept female students. Instead, she was forced to become a nurse at Middlesex Hospital, a profession that had become respectable through the work of Nightingale and her colleagues in professionalising nursing training and practice. Nevertheless, it came to light that the Society of Apothecaries did not specify that females were banned from taking their examinations and in 1865 Garrett sat and passed their examination before the loophole that allowed this was closed. Other countries began to allow women to enter the profession: in 1864 the University of Zurich admitted female students while the universities of Paris, Berne and Geneva followed suit in 1867. Garrett later was appointed visiting physician to the East London Hospital but though she subsequently graduated from the University of Paris, the British Medical Register refused to recognise her MD degree. In the next few years she opened the women-run New Hospital for Women in London with Elizabeth Blackwell and helped Sophia Jex-Blake to establish the London Medical School for Women to which Garrett Anderson was elected Dean of the London School of in 1884. The legal situation of women who wished to become doctors did not change, however. Though Edinburgh University allowed Sophia Jex-Blake and Edith Pechy to attend medical lectures in 1869, male fellow students rioted and their final examinations were rendered void as university regulations only allowed medical degrees to be given to men. The consequence of this was that the British Medical Association therefore refused to register the women as doctors. However, Russell Gurney, a MP and supporter of women's rights took the first legal steps to remedying the situation and in 1876 the Enabling Act was passed that allowed universities to award female students degrees in their subject. This meant that all medical training bodies were now free to teach women in this area if they chose to do so. The following year the Royal Free Hospital admitted women medical students for clinical training and the University of London adopted a new charter in 1878 that allowed women to graduate from their courses. Individual institutions were slowly forced to change their practices to permit women to hold their degrees, though some, like Oxford and Cambridge, resisted until 1920 and 1948 respectively. By 1891, 101 women doctors were in practice in the British Isles, and the following years the British Medical Association was finally forced to admit women doctors.

In the 1860s, a number of individuals such as Bessie Rayner Parkes and Barbara Bodichon, who were involved in creating employment agencies for women and opening up a variety of professions, became involved in the campaign for women's suffrage. The two movements came to be closely connected through shared membership. Many saw votes for women as the only means by which the professions could be opened up to both sexes and the conditions of working women improved through appropriate legislation. The connection between the two campaigns continued into the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Individual members of suffrage societies were involved in the work of the Women's Industrial Council, which was established in 1886 to campaign for 'equal pay for equal work'. The London Society for Women's Suffrage established a Women's Service department and a bee toymakers' scheme during the First World War, which later became the Women's Employment Department in the post-war period.

Louisa Maria Hubbard (1836-1906), promoter of employment for women and journal editor, was born in St Petersburg in 1836, the eldest daughter of an English merchant, William Egerton Hubbard, who returned to Britain in 1843. The family lived in Leonardslee near Horsham, Sussex, where she was educated at home. She began her public life in the 'deaconess movement', an organisation she supported between 1864-1874. From 1869, Louisa was editor of the Englishwoman's Yearbook. This publication provided a list of all the institutions and societies which existed for the benefit of women and children. In 1873, Louisa was responsible for establishing Bishop Otter College in Chichester. It was a training college for ladies wishing to work as elementary teachers. In 1875 Louisa founded the Woman's Gazette. This paper became known as Work and Leisure from Jan 1880. She was the editor of these papers from 1875-1893. From 1884-1885, she was involved with the United Englishwoman's Emigration Association whose aim was to emigrate women of good character, to ensure their safety during and after their travel and to keep in touch with them for some time after their arrival. In Nov 1885, Ellen Joyce and Mrs Adelaide Ross replaced Louisa Hubbard at the head of the organisation. She was also involved with the United British Women's Emigration Association. Louisa Hubbard died 25 Nov 1906.

The club named the Women's Institute (1897-1928) predated the more famous National Federation of Women's Institutes by almost two decades and was of a very different character. It was founded in 1897 at 15 Grosvenor Crescent by Mrs Nora Wynford Philipps and was intended to be a centre for women involved in the professions, education, social and philanthropic work. It was also intended to make other societies' work better known through its information bureau and co-operated with the Central Bureau for the Employment of Women regularly. It initially held weekly debates and 'at homes' run by the Executive Committee and organised a musical society, an art society, a recreational department, a circulating library, and a voluntary workers' society for philanthropic work. It also organised a secretarial department that undertook the training of typists and book keepers as well as an employment service for its members. At the same time it acted as a centre for the organisation of social and educational activities and a centre for research and dissemination of information on various subjects. It was responsible for the publication of several works such as Mrs Sidgwick's 'The Place of University Education in the Life of Women', pamphlet versions of lectures and the 'Dictionary of Employments Open to Women'. By the turn of the century it had over 800 members and maintained links with over 45 other groups, making it necessary to move to its second location at 92 Victoria Street from where a large range of other feminist organisations operated. In 1916 it was responsible for the opening of the Women's Club for the wives and mothers of servicemen and during the First World War gave rooms to the British Women's Patriotic League, the London School of Needlework, the Women's Local Government Society and the Head Mistresses Association amongst others. After the war, it was the location of meetings of the Dexter Club, the Censorship Club and the association for former members of the Scottish Women's Hospitals. While is appears to have still been active in 1925, activities ceased some time around 1928.

The British Women's Temperance Association (1876-1925) was founded under the presidency of Mrs Edward Parker in 1876 to organise women to encourage temperance by education and other means, and to agitate for the restriction of sales of alcohol. In addition it targeted activities at the 7-30 age group, including summer schools and competitions. It was affiliated to the World Women's Christian Temperance Union. It published the 'British Women's Temperance Association Journal' from 1892 entitled 'Wings'. Lady Henry Somerset wanted allegiance between the Association and the suffrage movement, however not all members were in agreement. This caused a rift in 1893, with the formation of the Women's Total Abstinence Union (taking with them the journal 'Wings'). Lady Henry had previously taken over The Woman's Herald, which became the journal for the Association. In 1894 it became The Woman's Signal, officially the Association's journal, but now under the ownership and editorship of Florence Fenwick-Miller. In 1896 the Association started its own paper The White Ribbon. In 1925 the Association and the Women's Total Abstinence Union resolved their differences and merged to become the National British Women's Total Abstinence Union. It later included gambling and moral welfare as part of its interests.

Teresa Billington-Greig (1877-1964) was born in Preston, Lancashire in 1877 and brought up in Blackburn in a family of drapers. Although from a Roman Catholic family, Billington-Greig became an agnostic whilst still in her teens. Having left school with no qualifications she was initially apprenticed to the millinery trade. However, she ran away from home and educated herself well enough at night classes to become a teacher. She worked as a teacher at a Roman Catholic school in Manchester, studying at Manchester University in her spare time, until her own agnosticism made this impossible. From there Billington-Greig joined the Municipal Education School service where her religious beliefs brought her into conflict with her employers. However, through the Education Committee there she met Emmeline Pankhurst in 1903 who found her work in a Jewish school, while that same year she became a member and organiser of the Independent Labour Party. In Apr 1904 she was the founder and honorary secretary of the local branch of the Equal Pay League within the National Union of Teachers. In either late 1903 or early 1904, she joined the Women's Social & Political Union (WSPU) and became one of their travelling speakers. She was sent to London with Annie Kenney to foster the movement there and to create a London-based organisation, which eventually became the headquarters of the Union. This was done on a small financial budget. The following year she was asked to become the second full-time organiser of the group in its work with the Labour Party and in this capacity she organised publicity and demonstrations as well as building up the group's new national headquarters in London. In Jun 1906, Billington-Greig was arrested in an affray outside of Asquith's home and later sentenced to a fine or two months in Holloway Prison. She was the first suffragette to be sent to Holloway Prison although an anonymous reader of the Daily Mirror paid the fine.

Later in the same month, Jun 1906, she was sent to organise the WSPU in Scotland and it was here that she married Frederick Lewis Greig 1907. However, growing differences with the Pankhursts led to her resignation as a paid organiser, though she remained in the group as a member until Oct 1907. In Oct 1907, Mrs Pankhurst suspended the constitution and took over government of the WSPU with her daughter Christabel. Several prominent members left the WSPU, including Billington-Greig, Mrs How-Martyn and Charlotte Despard who together went on to form the Women's Freedom League (WFL) on the basis of organisational democracy. Billington-Greig was initially appointed the National Honorary Organising Secretary for the League. However, Billington-Greig once more resigned in 1910 when the WFL undertook a new campaign of militancy after the defeat of the Conciliation Bill. Although she did not immediately join another organisation Billington-Greig continued to write and carry out public speaking engagements - activities she continued throughout her life. She also cared for her daughter, born in 1915, and supported her husband's billiards table company. Her only organisational work until 1937 was in the field of sport. Then she once more joined the Woman's Freedom League working for it's Women's Electoral Committee. After the Second World War this became the Women for Westminster group with which she remained involved. Subsequently she took part in the Conference on the Feminine Point of View (1947-1951) and after 1958 she was a member of the Six Point Group while writing her account of the Suffrage Movement.

She had a keen interest in the history of the suffrage movement, as well as her writings on the subject she compiled many biographies. Some of these were created for obituaries for the Manchester Guardian. Her writings on behalf of the women's cause (but to some extent in criticism of it) included 'The Militant Suffrage Movement', published in 1911. Other writings cover a wide range of topics of social and feminist interest. She wrote innumerable articles for a variety of journals. Her interests were wide and she was involved in a large number of women's organisation. In 1904 she had formed the Manchester Branch of the Equal Pay League. She held strong views on a variety of subjects of public interest, but especially equality between the sexes in education and in marriage. She died in 1964.

James Ramsay MacDonald (1866-1937), was born in Lossiemouth, Morayshire in 1866, the illegitimate son of Ann Ramsay, a maidservant. He studied at the local school from 1875 until 1881 before becoming a pupil-teacher. Aged nineteen, he went to Bristol before moving to London in 1886, where he was employed as a clerk for the Cyclists' Touring Club. Poverty and ill-health ended his attempts to win a science scholarship and be became a clerk to Thomas Lough, MP. MacDonald joined the Fabian Society around this time and there met others such as George Bernard Shaw, Annie Besant, Walter Crane and the Webbs who were concerned with issues such as socialism and women's suffrage. In 1893 the Independent Labour Party was formed by members of this group, including Philip Snowden, Robert Smillie, Tom Mann, John Bruce Glasier, Ben Tillett and James Keir Hardie.

Mrs Mary Ellen Taylor (fl 1910-1914) and her husband Captain Thomas Smithies Taylor were friends of the Pethick Lawrence family, Dr Elizabeth Wilkes (her sister) and her brother-in-law Mark Wilkes. By early 1912 Mrs Taylor was an active member of the Women's Social & Political Union which was then engaged in a campaign of militant action against government and private property. On 4 Mar 1912 she took part in a window smashing party with a Miss Roberts and a Miss Nellie Crocker, attacking a post office in Sloane Square. They were arrested and brought before a magistrate at Westminster Police Court, who referred their case to the Sessions. From the 5-22 Mar 1912 they were placed on remand at Holloway Prison until Taylor went before Newington Session and was given a three months sentence. While in prison, she went on hunger strike, though she was not forcibly fed, and was subsequently discharged and taken to her sister's house on the 27 Apr 1912. She was imprisoned a second time in Jul 1913 under the alias of Mary Wyan of Reading. Mrs Ellen Mary Taylor refused release under the Cat and Mouse [Temporary Discharge for Ill-health] Act of 1913. She claimed complete discharge and declined to give the prison governor any address. When she was conveyed to a nursing home she refused to enter until her full release was granted and continued her strike on a chair in the road outside. The police then removed her to the Kensington Infirmary where she eventually gave up her protest. Around this time, the Woodford assault case took place, touching the Taylor's immediate circle of friends.

Captain Thomas Smithies-Taylor (fl 1910-1914) was the husband of Mrs Mary Ellen Taylor. He was a supporter of the militant suffragettes based in Leicester. He wrote letters to the national and local press on this and related subjects.

Dr Elizabeth Wilkes (fl.1910) was married to Mark Wilkes, he was a teacher employed by London County Council and a member of the Men's League for Women's Suffrage. She was also a suffragist and a member of the Women's Tax Resistance League. On the occasion when she refused to pay her taxes, her husband was obliged by law to pay the amount on her behalf. However, Mark Wilkes refused to do so and was sent to Brixton prison for this action. The Men's League organised a protest march to the prison and the Daily Herald interviewed Wilkes while in prison. He went on hunger strike and was released due to ill health. A meeting was subsequently organised by the Women's Tax Resistance League at the Caxton Hall in honour of the couple.

Mark Wilkes (fl. 1894-1914) was a teacher and the husband of Elizabeth Wilkes (1861-1956). Elizabeth refused to complete a tax return or to pay taxes herself and informed the tax authorities that as a married woman her tax papers should be forwarded to her husband. He, in turn, claimed that he had neither the means to obtain the necessary information to complete the forms nor to pay his wife's tax bill and was imprisoned for debt. The Tax Resistance League took up the case and achieved much publicity for it.

Women's Social & Political Union (WSPU) (1903-c.1919) was the prime mover of suffrage militancy. In Oct 1903 the WSPU was founded in Manchester at Emmeline Pankhurst's home in Nelson Street. Members include: Emmeline, Adela and Christabel Pankhrst, Teresa Billington-Greig, Annie Kenney and Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy. Several had been members of the NUWSS and had links with the Independent Labour Party, but were frustrated with progress, reflected in the WSPU motto 'Deeds, not Words'. An initial aim of WSPU was to recruit more working class women into the struggle for the vote. In late 1905 the WSPU began militant action with the consequent imprisonment of their members. The first incident was on 13 Oct 1905, Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney attended a meeting in London where they heckled the speaker Sir Edward Grey, a minister in the British government. Pankhurst and Kenney were arrested, charged with assault upon a police officer and fined five shillings each. They refused to pay the fine and were sent to prison. In 1906 the WSPU moved to London and continued militant action - with the Daily Mail calling the activists 'suffragettes' an unfavourable term adopted by the group. Between 1906-1908 there were several constitutional disagreements with the Women's Freedom League being founded in Nov 1907 by the 'Charlotte Despard faction'. From 1908 the WSPU tactics of disturbing meetings developed to breaking the windows of government buildings. This increased the number of women imprisoned. In Jul 1909 Marion Dunlop was the first imprisoned suffragette to go on hunger strike, many suffragettes followed her example and force-feeding was introduced. Between 1910-1911 the Conciliation Bills were presented to Parliament and militant activity ceased, but when Parliament sidelined these Bills the WSPU re-introduced their active protests.

Between 1912-1914 there was an escalation of WSPU violence - damage to property and arson and bombing attacks became common tactics. Targets included government and public buildings, politicians' homes, cricket pavilions, racecourse stands and golf clubhouses. Some members of the WSPU such as the Pethick-Lawrences, disagreed with this arson campaign and were expelled. Other members showed their disapproval by leaving the WSPU. The Pethick-Lawrences took with them the journal 'Votes for Women', hence the new journal of the WSPU the 'Suffragette' launched in Oct 1912. In 1913 in response to the escalation of violence, imprisonment and hunger strikes the government introduced the Prisoner's Temporary Discharge of Ill Health Act (popularly known as the 'Cat and Mouse Act'). Suffragettes who went on hunger strike were released from prison as soon as they became ill and when recovered they were re-imprisoned.

Discord within the WSPU continued - In Jan 1914 Sylvia Pankhurst's 'East London Federation of the WSPU' was expelled from the WSPU and became an independent suffrage organisation. On 4 Aug 1914, England declared war on Germany. Two days later the NUWSS announced that it was suspending all political activity until the war was over. In return for the release of all suffragettes from prison the WSPU agreed to end their militant activities. The WSPU organised a major rally attended by 30,000 people in London to emphasise the change of direction. In Oct 1915, The WSPU changed its newspaper's name from 'The Suffragette' to 'Britannia'. Emmeline's patriotic view of the war was reflected in the paper's new slogan: 'For King, For Country, for Freedom'. the paper was 'conservative' in tone and attacked campaigners, politicians, military leaders and pacifists for not furthering the war effort. Not all members supported the WSPU war policy and several independent groups were set up as members left the WSPU. In 1917 the WSPU became known as the 'Women's Party and in Dec 1918 fielded candidates at the general election (including Christabel Pankhurst). However they were not successful and the organisation does not appear to have survived beyond 1919.

Lydia Becker (1827-1890) was born in the Manchester area in Feb 1827 the eldest of 15 children the surviving siblings being Mary, Esther, Edward, Wilfred, Arthur, John and Charles. Her father, Hannibal Leigh Becker (1803-1877) was the son of Ernest Hannibal Becker (1771-1852) a German immigrant who had settled in England and become a naturalised citizen. Hannibal married Mary Duncroft and became the proprietor of first a calico-printing works at Reddish and then a chemical works at Altham in Lancashire. The couple had fifteen children. Her early life was conventional her main interests were in astronomy and botany, and she wrote one book on each subject. In 1865, the family moved to central Manchester where Becker founded the Manchester Ladies' Literary Society, which was a centre for scientific interests and at the first meeting a paper written by Darwin for the event was read. The previous year she had attended a Social Science Association meeting and heard Barbara Bodichon lecture on women's emancipation. Bodichon encouraged her to contact Emily Davis. Through these individuals, Becker became involved with local suffrage groups. In Feb 1867, she was named honorary secretary of the Manchester Committee for Women's Suffrage and was instrumental in rewriting its constitution as the Manchester National Society for Women's Suffrage. In 1868 she became treasurer of the Married Women's Property Committee. She travelled about the country organising meetings and support for the issue throughout the 1860s and was involved in the campaign to have women ratepayers included on the electoral register. She worked alongside Jacob Bright as the parliamentary agent of the National Society for Women's Suffrage to have the amendment to the Municipal Franchise Bill passed in 1869 so that this could be achieved at a local, if not a national, level. However, her efforts were not restricted to suffrage. In 1870, she was the first woman to be elected to the Manchester School Board, she was also the founder-editor of the 'Woman's Suffrage Journal' in 1870. In the 1870s she was active in the campaign to have the Contagious Diseases Acts repealed and worked beside Josephine Butler and Elizabeth Wolstenholme in the Vigilance Association for the Defence of Personal Rights. She organised a significant repeal meeting in the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, 1870 with JB, Elizabeth Wolstenholme and James Stuart. She also served on the LNA Executive Committee between 1872-1873. She introduced the first motion against Bruce's Bill at the Conference of Repeal Organisations, 29 Feb 1872. However, parliamentary developments in 1874 led many to believe that the vote might be granted to single though not married women. Becker pragmatically supported this as an interim measure, leading to criticism from the Pankhursts, the Brights and Wolstenholme Elmy. In the later part of that decade she was secretary to the Central Committee of the National Society for Women's Suffrage and remained with it when the London societies divided over opposition to the CD Acts in 1888. However, her health began to deteriorate and she withdrew from active work in 1889 and travelled to Aix-les-Bains to recuperate. On the 21 Jul 1890 she died in Geneva, Switzerland having contracted diphtheria.

Eliza Tabor (1835-1914) was born in 1835, the daughter of John Tabor, a private school teacher in York, and Mary Holdich. She and her sister Mary Catherine were educated at home and then became school assistants in the family's establishment. Eliza Tabor published her first works in the early 1850s, a series of articles in the British Mothers' Magazine which were later brought together under the title of 'Woodcroft'. This was followed by one novel, 'All for the Best: The Story of a Quiet Life' which was poorly received and another, 'St Olave', which established her as a novelist. This in turn was followed by another, 'Juanita's Cross', which was the first of a series which had a religious theme. This was a reflection of her theological thinking in the period as, after her father's death, she renounced the family's Methodism along with her mother and sister. However, they remained in contact with many family friends and in particular, the Stephensons of Nottingham. Their son John, who had returned from India as a widower, became engaged to her and the couple were married in Bombay in 1875. They remained in India where Stephenson was a senior chaplain until Eliza Tabor returned home in late 1880 and began to look after her stepchildren from her husband's first marriage as well as helping her mother during her illness. In her new home in Malvern she established a local Ruskin Society to discuss his works and became friends with Arthur Tennyson. She and the children remained there for seven years during which time she began to write for the young, and completed several adult novels. Brief marital problems in 1885 were followed by the death of her mother and the return of her husband in spring 1886. He accepted the parish of St Thomas'in Toxteth, Liverpool, where the family moved the following year and remained until 1892 when they moved to Boston in Lincolnshire. She no longer published and lived the life of a vicar's wife after this until 1905 when her husband retired due to illness. They both died in 1914.

The Josephine Butler Society (1962-fl.2007) was formed in 1962 when the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene was renamed. Its objectives were: To promote a high and equal standard of morality and sexual responsibility for men and women in public opinion, law and practice; To promote the principles of the International Abolitionist Federation in order to secure the abolition of state regulation of prostitution, to combat the traffic in persons and to expose and prevent any form of exploitation of prostitution by third parties; To examine any existing or proposed legislation on matters associated with prostitution or related aspects of public order and to promote social, legal and administrative reforms in furtherance of the above objectives. Its basic principles were: social justice; equality of all citizens before the law; a single moral standard for men and women. (Taken from membership and donation form 1990). The Josephine Butler Society was a pressure group not a rescue organisation. It wished to prevent the exploitation of prostitutes and marginalisation of those who could be forced into this activity by poverty and abuse, and it believed these problems should be addressed by changes in the law. It believed that more should be done to prevent young people from drifting into prostitution, to help those who wished to leave it, and to rehabilitate its victims. Its work in the early 21st century took two main forms: to make representation to various departments of the UK Government on prostitution and related issues an; to liase and network with other agencies both statutory and voluntary who worked in related areas. As at 2008 it was still active.

The origins of the Josephine Butler Society are based in the campaigns against the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864-1869. The Acts were a series of measures aimed at reducing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases in the armed forces and applied to a number of ports and garrison towns. Police forces were granted powers to identify and register prostitutes who were then forced to undergo compulsory medical examinations. Women who refused to submit willingly could be arrested and brought before a magistrate. The campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts brought together moralists, feminists and libertarians and included campaigners such as the parliamentarian James Stansfeld, the Sheffield radical Henry J. Wilson and the writer Harriet Martineau. It proved to be one of the largest cross-party political campaigns of the nineteenth century, comparable only to the Corn Laws agitation. The campaign was successful; the Contagious Diseases Acts were suspended in 1883 and finally repealed in 1886.

Josephine Butler (ne Grey 1828-1906) was a leading feminist, prolific writer and tireless campaigner. She was appointed President of the North of England Council for the Higher Education of Women 1867-1869 and edited the influential collection of essays Woman's work and woman's culture in 1869. Having been involved in 'rescue work' with Liverpool prostitutes she became leader of the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1869. She later campaigned with WT Stead against child prostitution in London and from 1886 was involved in opposing measures in India, under the Cantonement Acts, to establish military brothels.

Myra Eleanor Sadd Brown (1872-1938) was born in Maldon, Essex on 3 Oct 1872. Her parents were John Granger Sadd and Mary Ann Price and she was the tenth of eleven children. The family operated a firm of timber merchants and processors in the hometown of Maldon. Myra Sadd received a private education at a school in Colchester. She met Ernest Brown through her interest in cycling; they were married in 1896. The couple moved to Finsbury Park in London, and then to Hampstead. Myra and Ernest had three daughters and one son. Due to the commercial success of her husband's business Myra was provided with independent means. Myra was raised within a Congregationalist environment; later becoming a Christian Scientist. She was interested in artistic pursuits and avidly enjoyed Shaw's plays. Myra is particularly renowned for being a feminist. It is believed that prior to her marriage she purchased a small property giving her, as a ratepayer, the right to vote. In Hackney, Myra served as a Poor Law Guardian. Furthermore, she was a committed supporter of the women's suffrage movement; being a member of the Women's Social and Political Union. In 1912, Myra was arrested and imprisoned; she went on hunger strike and endured forcible feeding. Myra wrote a great deal on behalf of the suffrage cause; the 'Christian Commonwealth' being one such periodical which published her letters. Later, she became associated with Sylvia Pankhurst's East London Federation of Suffragettes, inviting East London women, travelling by bus, to visit her home near Maldon. Following WWI, Myra became an active member of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (later known as the International Alliance of Women). She travelled widely throughout Europe attending conferences. This activity allowed her to indulge her interest in other cultures and countries, as did her periods of wintering in Italy and Egypt with her husband Ernest. Although Myra herself did not speak a foreign language, she insisted that her children should study French and German. The emerging Commonwealth became another area of interest to Myra. From 1923 she had been involved in meetings, which culminated in the formation of the British Commonwealth League (later the Commonwealth Countries League) in 1925. It was a feminist organisation devoted to the upholding of women's rights in the Commonwealth of which Myra became its Treasurer. In 1931 Ernest died of rheumatic heart disease. In 1937 Myra visited South-East Asia where she was present for the birth of her second grandchild. She then extended the tour to visit Angkor Wat and the Malaysian islands. Myra continued her journey to Hong Kong, planning to return via the Trans-Siberian railway. However, she suffered a stroke and died in Hong Kong on 13 Apr 1938. The British Commonwealth League established the Sadd Brown Library of material on women in the Commonwealth as a memorial to her. It was placed in the Women's Service Library, now The Women's Library. Myra's interest in the Commonwealth Countries League, and the International Alliance of Women, has been continued first by her daughter Myra Stedman, and subsequently by Lady Diana Dollery, her granddaughter, both of whom have been closely involved in the development of the Sadd Brown Library.

Art and Architecture (A and A) (est 1982) is a membership organisation which provides a network for practitioners and a forum for debate surrounding the role of public art, design and building. Its origins can be found in a conference, Art and Architecture, held at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1982. The event represented a coming together of various strands of thought and activity which had been considering the notion of art in a public context as beneficial to the environment. Art and Architecture as a membership society was formed in the wake of the conference and soon organised itself into four working parties, each addressing a different issue which had been prioritised during the conference. These included Per Cent for Art legislation (promoting the notion that a percentage of the capital costs for building should be allocated to an artistic contribution); the Live Projects Commissions group; the Events group, which organised a series of lectures; and Information and Education, which resulted in production of a newsletter (later the Art and Architecture Journal). A single A and A management board was established under the chair Sir Peter Shepherd. Later chairs included Theo Crosby, Peter Rawstorne, Jenny Towndrow, Christopher Martin, Peter Lloyd-Jones and Graham Cooper.

A and A has organised many lectures, conferences and other events in addition to producing the Art and Architecture journal, edited for many years by former Royal College of Art Librarian Hans Brill. An overriding theme of its work has been the interdisciplinary process and the potential for collaboration and communication between architects and artists, designers and makers.

In 2002, A and A organised a series of events under the banner 'Next Generation' to mark its twentieth anniversary and to consider new approaches to public art and collaboration for the 21st century. The donation of the archive coincided with its twenty-fifth anniversary, around which a number of events were planned, including a three-month exhibition at the Buildings Centre.

The Royal College of Art was founded in 1837 as the Government School of Design. In 1853 the School moved to South Kensington where it became the much enlarged National Art Training School, part of the development of the area by the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. The title Royal College of Art was conferred in 1896 with the emphasis on art and design practice. In the mid-20th century the College began the teaching of product design and the provision of specialised professional instruction including graphic and industrial design. The 1960s were a time of physical expansion and a Royal Charter in 1967 gave the College independent university status with the ability to award its own degrees.

Student activity at the Royal College of Art is reflected in the development of projects within individual departments, culminating in the exhibition of work in the annual graduate shows. Since the mid 20th century, when teaching of product, graphical and technical design began, a comprehensive pictorial record has been kept of student work. Work from the annual degree shows has been photographed as comprehensively as possible since the 1960s; in 1979 this effort was centralised with the RCA's slide library assuming responsibility for photography and cataloguing. Images are stored as prints and slides covering the years up to and including 2002, after which a move to born-digital photography, cataloguing and delivery was effected.

Student records began to be maintained two years after the College received its royal charter in 1896 but records for each individual student begin in 1910.